Earlier today I was pointed toward this video by Canadian outdoorsman, photographer, and self-described self-reliance educator Shawn James. The video is a five-minute time-lapse of James building a log cabin from scratch in the Canadian wilderness.

In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, upon confessing to Professor Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, that the Sorting Hat (a hat new students put on their head to determine which house they will be placed) only placed him in Gryffindor because he explicably asked not to be put in Slytherin, Harry was greeted by this reply from Dumbledore:

One of the hardest parts of reviewing books (both privately, and in a public forum) is in justifying one rating against another. In my own rating system, a colour-coded spreadsheet which my wife rightly points out is somewhat over the top, I allow for half-ratings (I readily admit this is something of a cop-out, as it allows me to pile on the 4.5 ratings while preserving five star ratings for the best of the best. Should I start allowing for quarter stars, or is that going too far?), which helps but doesn’t solve this problem.

I’ve been thinking about quake books recently. The concept of ‘quake’ reading came to me through Ryan Holiday, who in an almost decade-old blog post discussed an email exchange he had with the economist Tyler Cowen. In the exchange, Cowen noted that as he gets older he’s running out of books to read that can profoundly change his views or open up his mind to something new (or at least that’s how I interpreted his thoughts).

It’s been a while since I’ve had a blog. I wrote extensively between 2009-2013 before falling out of the habit. At this point I was working on My Morning Routine (which had launched the previous year) and client commissions, leading my blog to falter.